“And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.”
Our lives have mystery and purpose spoken into them. We may progress on a journey of expectation in the natural that is diverted and God takes us to a place we did not expect.
He has the ability to change our desires and mould us to fit. He has the power to create new wine within us and change our skin to a new skin to fit it.
It is by simply abiding in Him that we are fruitful. Abiding in Him may often necessitate a pruning off and a letting go of what we have grown to hold dear in our heart.
It, however, does not matter what it looks like if we know we are following God.
Our ministry is love and servanthood. We would do anything for Jesus and for others. Ministry looks like where He leads. Fruitfulness is living in the vine.
He knows our purpose and He will take us where we did not expect. Our dreams of life in the world and in the natural may have been of having huge impact.
We may think largeness is pleasing to God. We may even have a sense of shame at anything less and living a normal life without recognition. His joy and rejoicing, however, are over our surrendering. He honours sacred smallness.
Our purpose fulfilled in the ordinary but in seeing the one, serving and loving in that moment and being the blessing. The sweetness of the fruit, the wine, in that place and that season.
“to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ,”
He honours us all with a purpose in Him. His pleasure is in our hearts abiding in the vine producing His fruit not our own.
Inspirational things can be done and are done as part of His Holy Spirits bidding and wisdom, rooted in love.
“Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.”
The Lord is dissolving the division between the sacred and the secular.
There is no hierarchy. He honours the sacredness in the small, the ordinary and it is from these platforms He loves our worship to crescendo from.
This is where He will be noticed and hungered for. All else is becoming unsatisfactory. Jesus only satisfies.
Love only is the pure motivation of the heart.
“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.”
We are abiding in Him to be those who can restore. Stepping in helping in the natural:
Parents to provide. The widows and sick to be healed. The orphaned to know they are precious and loved. Those in the mundane and ordinary around us.
To activate and enable transformation when others experience His presence and their eternal value. We all need to feel love and being loved; to experience the destiny we were born for. Laying our life down and our ‘yes’ changes the future.
We are the sheep. He is the shepherd. We know the small voice. We say ‘yes’ and follow.
The illustration shows us the sheep who hear His spiritual voice and follow in faith and love to abide simply in the destiny and purpose we were born for. Light emanating to push back the darkness.
Four Scriptures that come to mind:
“And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” Math 22:37-40 ESV
“to equip the saints for the work of ministry, for building up the body of Christ,”. Ephesians 4:12 ESV
“Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.” Ephesians 4:15-16 ESV
“If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing.” 1 Corinthians 13:1-2 ESV
The song This I Believe (Creed). Hillsong
Lessisgreater 